As someone who writes about AI, one of the most common questions I get is "How are artists going to survive AI?"

Well, I’m not sure, but an influx of startups is trying to crack that nut. For example, last month I wrote about Replica, a voice AI platform that trains its LLMs off of the work of fairly compensated voice actors. Now Cara is here, offering a digital bubble for visual artists that AI can’t touch.

Cara is a social app for artists and it's gone viral, earning a bunch of media coverage after jumping from 40k to 650k users in a week (it hit 900k users last week). Cara is not too dissimilar from Instagram + Threads — artists can upload portfolios, but the UI is akin to IG posts, plus you can post text updates like Threads or X. The big difference is that Cara won’t use your work to train any LLMs, and the platform filters out generative AI images.

If you try to upload an AI-generated image, you’ll get a message that says it's not allowed, which you can appeal if it’s a mistake. Cara also has a partnership with The Glaze Project, a product from researchers at the University of Chicago that subtly alters the pixels of your artwork to prevent original work from being scraped. Artists have the option to apply Glaze to their work upon uploading it.

So how has Cara gone so viral? The team’s anti-Meta approach has helped it gain followers from fed-up artists. Founder and designer Jingna Zhang explained to TechCrunch that her anger level was increased upon seeing that EU artists can opt out of giving Meta permission to train its AI with their posts, but Meta won’t apply the same rules to other territories. Zhang is well suited to lead an artist movement as someone who puts her time where her mouth is. She’s part of multiple lawsuits that fight for rights on behalf of herself and other artists, including one against Google for using copyrighted work to train Imagen.

Cara’s sudden growth has come with some public pain points, but protecting original art is a hard issue to solve, so I’m personally hoping the app can generate some momentum for the underdog.

Dream Machine is a text-to-video model that competes with OpenAI’s Sora, outperforming Sora's output at 120 frames of video in around 120 seconds. Dream Machine is built by Luma AI, an a16z and Nvidia-backed startup. Read more.

ICYMI, Apple launched Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, a crazy new calculator app, and more. You can read our digestible breakdown of the best new AI features here.

MARS5 TTS from CAMB.AI is an open-source, text-to-speech model, even for “extremely tough prosodic scenarios.” That means the AI can replicate speech rhythm and intonation patterns when it matters (e.g. imagine sports commentators or a movie trailer voice-overs.)

MotherDuck is now Generally Available. The cloud SQL analytics platform is recognized for its fresh approach to data infrastructure, including blending local and cloud query execution. Read the story.

Writer launched an AI studio with a Python framework to help companies build AI apps. The startup emerged as a product to help companies use AI style guides and grew quickly, locking down enterprise customers who, as it turns out, need help building more AI stuff. Read more.

TeamCreate is a tool that creates various types of AI workers from a simple Slack integration. It was launched by the team at Sivo, a fast-growing, YC-backed debt-as-a-service startup.

Below the fold but first in our hearts.

• Lettre.app lets you send “handwritten” notes to penpals you can meet abroad.
• Magic Publish researches YouTube for optimized titles, tags, and descriptions.
• Dad Can’t Draw creates custom coloring book pages from text prompts.
• TwoShot lets you create and remix music with voice, descriptions, or humming.
• Omi consolidates your contracts for collaboration in one place.
• Icons8 made an AI image generator for generating multiple images in the same style, trained on proprietary data, not by scraping the internet.

For Makers

• JustBackend is a lightweight database replacement for micro-SaaS or prototyping.
• Uizard launched Autodesigner 2.0 to generate and edit UI components.
• Liveblocks' SDK lets you choose real-time, multiplayer collaboration features to add to your apps.
• Subscribe to Product Hunt Dev for more dev tools weekly.

🐦 X (formerly Twitter) has hidden likes for all users by default.

🍎 Apple saw its biggest share price jump since 2022 after WWDC.

✍️ YouTube is testing out notes — a new way for users to add context.

💸 Tesla shareholders have voted yes (again) to approve Elon’s $56B pay plan.

🤖 Brave is integrating its search results with its own AI-powered chatbot, Leo.

📸 Canon is making a special lens for Apple’s Vision Pro spatial video features.

📰 Yahoo is resurrecting Artifact, the news app founded by the Instagram founder.

🗣️ OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has responded to Elon’s Apple Intelligence comments.